https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-9-2026
"Last night’s thirteen-minute Super Bowl half-time show featuring Bad Bunny had
more watchers than any other halftime show in history: an estimated 135 million
watched live, while millions more have streamed it since. Rapper, singer, and
record producer Bad Bunny, whose given name is Benito Antonio Martínez
Ocasio, is from Puerto Rico, and rocketed to prominence with the release of his
first hit single on January 25, 2016. On February 1, 2026, just a week before
the halftime show, Bad Bunny made history by being the first artist to win
Album of the Year at the Grammys for an album recorded in Spanish.
Right-wing critics complained about the NFL’s invitation for Bad Bunny to do
the halftime show, saying he was “not an American artist.”
In fact, people born in Puerto Rico are American citizens. But Puerto Rico has
an odd relationship with the United States government, a relationship born of
the combination of late-nineteenth-century economics and U.S. racism.
In the 1880s, large companies in various industries gobbled up their
competitors to create giant “trusts” that monopolized their sector of the
economy. The most powerful trust in the United States was the Sugar Trust,
officially known as the American Sugar Refining Company, which by 1895
controlled about 95% of the U.S. sugar market. Thanks to pressure from the
Sugar Trust, in 1890, Congress passed the McKinley Tariff, which ended sugar
tariffs and tried to increase domestic production by offering a bounty on
domestic sugar.
This privileged domestic producers, and in 1893, sugar growers in Hawaii staged
a coup to overthrow the Hawaiian queen and asked Congress to admit the islands
as an American state. President Benjamin Harrison, a friend and confidant of
tariff namesake William McKinley, cheerfully backed annexation, but before the
treaty could be approved, an 1894 law reinstated the duties on sugar and ended
the bounties. Voters elected President Grover Cleveland later that year, and
with Hawaiians furiously protesting against the machinations of an American
business ring, Cleveland insisted on an investigation, and Hawaiian statehood
stalled.
When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, the Senate still did not have
enough votes to admit Hawaii, so Congress annexed it by a joint resolution and
McKinley, now president, signed the measure. As the popular magazine Harper’s
Weekly put it in a cartoon with a little boy dressed in the symbols of the
American flag eating candy, America was swallowing “sugar plums.”
The acquisition of the territory of Hawaii had begun the question of annexing
islands. Then the 1899
Treaty of Paris that ended the war transferred from
the control of Spain to the control of the United States the islands of Cuba,
the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, as well as a number of smaller islands
including Guam, all of which either were sugar producers or had the potential
to become sugar producers.
Since the
Northwest Ordinance of 1787, adopted under the Articles of
Confederation that made up the basis of the nation’s law before the
Constitution, the U.S. had rejected colonies and had instead established a
system for incorporating new territories into the country on terms of equality
to older states. But in the era of Jim Crow, annexing the newly acquired
islands under the terms established a century before presented a political
problem for lawmakers. Although sugar growers wanted the islands to be domestic
land for purposes of tariffs, most Americans did not want to include the Black
and Brown inhabitants of those lands in the United States on terms of equality
to white people."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
